Apple Becomes #1 Music Retailer

Just little more than a month ago I reported on how Apple's iTunes music service has passed up Best Buy to become the number two music retailer just under Wal-Mart.

Not surprisingly, Ars Technica has reported today that the latest NPD MusicWatch Survey for the month of January has shown Apple making a significant stride in passing Wal-Mart to now become the top music retailer in the nation.

The stats from the NPD Group show that the iTunes music store is the leading retailer, now with a 19 percent market share, as compared to Wal-Mart's 15 percent (including online and retail store sales), and Best Buy's third place position with 13 percent. According to Apple, iTunes now has more than 50 million customers who have purchased more than 4 billion songs.

Since the news at Ars Technica apparently came from a leaked internal Apple memo mailed to employees, some questioned the legitimacy of such a claim, but now Apple has officially announced the news in the Hot News section of their website.

Wal-Mart has been the leader of music sales for a long time running now, and although it is not too surprising that iTunes has stolen that crown, it is quite exciting to see an online-only, digital service bypass such a large, long-established brick and mortar retailer which offers both digital music downloads and audio CDs in stores. After all of the hell Napster had to go through, and all of the retaliation that the RIAA took against digital music and file-sharing, this feels like a big victory for our web-connected generation. This looks to be yet another nail in the coffin of the audio CD format as we know it, but when will the car audio industry catch up? Can we get some in-dash head units with solid-state drives built-in or something.

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